From Publishers Weekly
Hailed as a major poetic talent when T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber published his first book, Poems, 1933, Stephen Spender (1909–1995) was a close friend of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, sharing in his youth their bohemian gay lifestyle. Although Spender outlived most of his famous peers, his name remains inextricably linked with the 1930s. Sutherland (Reading the Decades), a professor of modern English literature at University College London, draws on unparalleled access to Spender's private papers and makes subtle use of his autobiography, World within World. Sutherland's intimate and admiring portrait reveals a disarmingly honest, gentle Spender. Beginning with an engrossing account of the poet's oppressive Edwardian childhood, Sutherland charts Spender's travel, writing and relationships with seamless attention to detail and deals unfussily with Spender's change in sexual persuasion, sparked in 1934 by a passionate affair with Muriel Gardiner, a spy for the socialist underground in Vienna, and continuing with Spender's long, happy marriage to pianist Natasha Litvin. Briefly a Communist, Spender throughout his life participated in liberal causes, from crafting antifascist propaganda during the Spanish Civil War to assisting with the formation of UNESCO. By middle age he was a celebrated cultural statesman. Shrewd, laconic and beautifully paced, Sutherland's portrait of a poet and his luminary circle will absorb all readers of 20th-century literary history. 36 b&w illus. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
He must have been incredibly charming. Stephen Spender (1909-1995) pops up everywhere in Anglo-American literary history and seems to have known everyone. In his most famous poem, Spender wrote "I think continually of those who were truly great." In his life he did more than think; he came to know the eminent as disciple, friend, confidant and adviser. He is like Zelig in Woody Allen's film, there in the background or off to the side everywhere one turns -- at a garden party with Virginia Woolf, hunched in the boy bars of 1930s Berlin with Christopher Isherwood, near the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War with Hemingway and Malraux, co-editing Horizon with Cyril Connolly during the Blitz.And that's just the start. When young Spender -- scion of a comfortable middle-class family -- traveled up to Oxford, he fell in among poets, and before long was part of "Macspaunday," as a contemporary critic dubbed the cutting-edge group consisting of Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden, C. Day Lewis and the tall, shock-haired Spender. Soon T.S. Eliot welcomed him as the lyric poet of the age, while Woolf urged him to devote his manifest talents to fiction. For years he and philosopher Isaiah Berlin -- probably his closest longtime intimate -- would spend annual opera holidays together in Salzburg. In Europe he regularly visited his old mentor, arguably the greatest German literary scholar of the century, E.R. Curtius. In truth, Spender couldn't take a walk in Cornwall without striking up a conversation with a young man who turned out to be Michael Ventris, the classicist who later deciphered Linear B. In the 1950s the poet was lured into co-founding the intellectual journal Encounter (and was eventually appalled to discover that it was secretly funded by the CIA); later he helped launch the Index on Censorship. During 1968 our man was in Paris during the Events of May; in fact, he was everywhere that year -- Berlin, Eastern Europe, Columbia University. The charisma never deserted him: Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky revered the elderly Spender, and the English man of letters Peter Ackroyd helped compile his collected poems. Blessings flowed, even unto the second generation: Son Matthew wed the daughter of painter Arshile Gorky; daughter Lizzie married the Australian actor Barry Humphries (known to the world as Dame Edna Everage).A fairy-tale life, it would seem. And yet.In this very long biography John Sutherland argues for Stephen Spender's greatness as a poet and all-round man of letters. He even hints that his subject deserved the Nobel Prize for literature (which seems ludicrous to me, until I think of some of those chosen over the past quarter-century). Does Sutherland make his case? Periodically he interrupts the brisk flow of his own engagingly conversational prose to quote a poem, and the verses invariably seem at best delicate or pretty and nearly always a bit shaky in their syntax. None breaks your heart like MacNeice's "Sunlight on the Garden" or Autumn Journal; none dazzles like Auden at even his most sesquipedalian. If Sutherland hopes for his biography to send readers back to his subject's poetry, he failed with me. I think the autobiographical World Within World (largely about the 1930s and war years) remains Spender's best book, that his criticism is intelligent but dated or unnecessary (I read virtually all of it in my younger days, and have never felt any desire to look at it again) and that he is likely to be remembered as the John William Burgon of his time. Burgon? He wrote reams of verse but lives only for a single line from his poem "Petra": "A rose-red city half as old as time." Just so, Stephen Spender is likely to be remembered for thinking continually of those who were truly great.Still, a fine literary biography doesn't need to be about the truly great, only about the truly interesting. Rupert Hart-Davis's Hugh Walpole and James Lees-Milne's Harold Nicolson are among the best writers' lives of our time, even if their splendid subjects -- exceptional young men on the make in the 20th-century literary world -- are now half forgotten and little read. Indeed, I suspect that Sutherland's Stephen Spender slips properly into this subgenre, for at the very least it may be hearkened to as an object lesson for the young. Spender's hedonist friend Cyril Connolly once warned that all excursions into journalism, broadcasting and magazine work, like the more obvious snares of society and the fashionable world, are largely traps for the unwary. These "enemies of promise" encourage poets and novelists to waste their best selves on unworthy projects, to dissipate the energy that should be reserved for masterpieces. It is a stern, high-minded dictum -- and one that Connolly himself could never follow, since, as Sutherland notes, he wasted the finest lapidary prose style of his generation on weekly book reviewing. Just so, Stephen Spender apparently couldn't refuse an invitation, and so awoke one day to find himself not Byron but rather Yeats's "sixty-year-old, smiling public man," ideally suited for visiting professorships and editorial boards, glamorous enough for talks, black-tie dinners and international literary festivities, an adornment to the book pages of London or New York and, finally, a required antique presence wherever two or three hundred were gathered together to honor the muses.Not that Spender didn't keep active, in his fashion. He taught and lectured and reviewed well into his eighties, largely, Sutherland claims, because he needed the money. One always does. But Spender also owned expensive houses in London and Provence, took long vacations along the Mediterranean, enjoyed the hospitality and wines of Philippe de Rothschild and other grand seigneurs. He lived very well indeed. During his youth he flitted about Europe on his family's money; afterwards, he was underwritten by wealthy admirers and the CIA, and then by generous fees for lectures and teaching. Even when he was a visiting professor, his courses generally proved the lightest of burdens -- a few workshops, sherry with would-be poets, lots of time for himself.But was it entirely for himself? In his youth Spender was homosexual. In 1934, however, he met a woman in Vienna named Muriel Gardiner -- the original of Lillian Hellman's Julia in her memoir Pentimento -- and they became lovers. Afterwards, he kept his boyfriend but started fooling around with girls, too, eventually marrying a rather wild thing named Inez. That marriage broke up, and, sometime later, he and the young pianist Natasha Litvin wed, quite happily. Nonetheless, good-looking young men seemed to re-enter the poet's life after he started to travel to America, often on his own. One cannot help but wonder. Sutherland scrupulously mentions Spender's involvement with young gay novelists (William Goyen, David Plante) and young gay scientists (such as Bryan Obst), but he leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. This is, after all, an authorized biography.But, let there be no mistake, a very good book, and one rich with anecdote and historic re-creation, whether of Spender's life as a London firefighter during World War II or of the whole sorry business of Encounter and its handlers. John Sutherland is a powerhouse researcher -- he singlehandedly produced The Stanford Guide to Victorian Fiction -- and he is also a distinguished professor at University College London and a fixture on the reviewing scene in Britain. Moreover, he knew Spender slightly in his own younger days. But then who didn't? Even I spoke with Sir Stephen two or three times on the phone, back when he contributed to Book World more than a quarter-century ago. He was, no surprise, incredibly charming. Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* "We were the 1930s." So declared poet Stephen Spender, underscoring the epoch-making literary influence that he--together with W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, and a handful of others--wielded during that fateful decade. The '30s, appropriately, loom large in this revealing new biography of Spender, probing the way one of England's most brilliant but protean modern poets helped to define 10 tempestuous years. Sutherland details, for instance, the personal transformations that, beginning in 1930, launched Spender on long journeys across Europe only to bring him home at decade's end. Simultaneous changes effected dizzying revolutions in Spender's sexual and political lives--into and out of homosexuality, into and out of communism. But none of the decade's metamorphoses receives more careful scrutiny than those that catapulted Spender into the literary limelight, then exposed him to severe criticism, and finally restored him to critical favor. In the Spender persona that had solidified by 1940--politically liberal, aesthetically modernist yet romantic--Sutherland recognizes the enduring characteristics that inspired intellectuals for the rest of Spender's long life. The only foreigner ever appointed to serve as the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, Spender emerged in his later years as a powerful exponent of Anglo-American understanding. This finely nuanced life portrait will advance such understanding. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
One of the leading poets and cultural icons of the 20th century, Stephen Spender was a prominent writer, literary critic, and social commentator--and close friend of some of the best-know creative talents of his day. Now, in this penetrating biography, John Sutherland paints a vivid portrait of Spender and of the glittering literary world of which he was a part, drawing on exclusive access to Spender's private papers. This briskly paced, compelling narrative illuminates the vast range of Spender's literary, political, and artistic interests. We follow Spender from childhood to his days at Oxford (where he first became friends with W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Isaiah Berlin); to his meteoric rise as poet in the 1930s, while still in his twenties; to his later years as cultural statesman, at home in both Britain and America. We witness many of the century's defining moments through Spender's eyes: the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Cold War, the 1960s sexual revolution, and the rise of America as a cultural force. And along the way, we are introduced to many of Spender's accomplished friends, including Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Cecil Day-Lewis, Joseph Brodsky, Lucian Freud, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. Perhaps most important, Sutherland has been granted exclusive access to Spender's private papers by his wife Natasha Spender. Thus he is able to provide a far more intimate look at the poet's personal life than has appeared in previous biographies. Featuring 36 unpublished photographs, Stephen Spender: A Literary Life throws light not only on this supremely gifted writer, but also on the literary and social history of the twentieth century.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

One of the leading poets and cultural icons of the 20th century, Stephen Spender was a prominent writer, literary critic, and social commentator—and close friend of some of the best-know creative talents of his day. Now, in this penetrating biography, John Sutherland paints a vivid portrait of Spender and of the glittering literary world of which he was a part, drawing on exclusive access to Spender's private papers.

This briskly paced, compelling narrative illuminates the vast range of Spender's literary, political, and artistic interests. We follow Spender from childhood to his days at Oxford (where he first became friends with W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Isaiah Berlin); to his meteoric rise as poet in the 1930s, while still in his twenties; to his later years as cultural statesman, at home in both Britain and America. We witness many of the century's defining moments through Spender's eyes: the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Cold War, the 1960s sexual revolution, and the rise of America as a cultural force. And along the way, we are introduced to many of Spender's accomplished friends, including Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Cecil Day-Lewis, Joseph Brodsky, Lucian Freud, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. Perhaps most important, Sutherland has been granted exclusive access to Spender's private papers by his wife Natasha Spender. Thus he is able to provide a far more intimate look at the poet's personal life than has appeared in previous biographies.

Featuring 36 unpublished photographs, Stephen Spender: A Literary Life throws light not only on this supremely gifted writer, but also on the literary and social history of the twentieth century.

FROM THE CRITICS

Michael Dirda - The Washington Post

… let there be no mistake, a very good book, and one rich with anecdote and historic re-creation, whether of Spender's life as a London firefighter during World War II or of the whole sorry business of Encounter and its handlers. John Sutherland is a powerhouse researcher -- he singlehandedly produced The Stanford Guide to Victorian Fiction -- and he is also a distinguished professor at University College London and a fixture on the reviewing scene in Britain. Moreover, he knew Spender slightly in his own younger days.

Daniel Swift - The New York Times

QWith Stephen Spender: A Literary Life, Sutherland wholeheartedly gives Spender's life back to him. Sutherland is an academic who has written scholarly studies of the Victorian publishing industry and several literary biographies; he is also a regular contributor on popular culture to The Guardian and The London Review of Books. He is a creative and oppositional scholar, and, blessedly for a literary critic, has a sense of humor. His biography of Spender is, the cover announces, authorized, and in the acknowledgments Sutherland thanks Spender's widow Natasha for the help she gave, ''often in the spirit of a co-author.'' This is the life, we are encouraged to believe, that Spender would have wished.

The New Yorker

Despite his versatility as a man of letters, Stephen Spender never lacked for hostile critics, and even his friends could not resist twitting him: Cyril Connolly once gibed that there were two Stephen Spenders—one “an inspired simpleton, a great big silly goose, a holy Russian idiot,” the other a clever operator who was “shrewd, ambitious, aggressive and ruthless.” Sutherland, an able advocate, portrays Spender as a decent and unfairly maligned figure whose early success as a poet in the thirties was a “cross he bore all his life.” Still, Spender moved easily in transatlantic intellectual circles, a footloose lecturer, broadcaster, and evangelist for liberal ideals during the Cold War years (although tainted by a scandal concerning the C.I.A.-funded journal Encounter, where he served as co-editor). Sutherland’s authorized biography takes Spender’s literary achievement as a given, but his close readings of the poems don’t quite persuade one that Spender was a writer of the first rank.

Publishers Weekly

Hailed as a major poetic talent when T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber published his first book, Poems, 1933, Stephen Spender (1909-1995) was a close friend of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, sharing in his youth their bohemian gay lifestyle. Although Spender outlived most of his famous peers, his name remains inextricably linked with the 1930s. Sutherland (Reading the Decades), a professor of modern English literature at University College London, draws on unparalleled access to Spender's private papers and makes subtle use of his autobiography, World within World. Sutherland's intimate and admiring portrait reveals a disarmingly honest, gentle Spender. Beginning with an engrossing account of the poet's oppressive Edwardian childhood, Sutherland charts Spender's travel, writing and relationships with seamless attention to detail and deals unfussily with Spender's change in sexual persuasion, sparked in 1934 by a passionate affair with Muriel Gardiner, a spy for the socialist underground in Vienna, and continuing with Spender's long, happy marriage to pianist Natasha Litvin. Briefly a Communist, Spender throughout his life participated in liberal causes, from crafting antifascist propaganda during the Spanish Civil War to assisting with the formation of UNESCO. By middle age he was a celebrated cultural statesman. Shrewd, laconic and beautifully paced, Sutherland's portrait of a poet and his luminary circle will absorb all readers of 20th-century literary history. 36 b&w illus. Agent, Victoria Hobbs. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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